Split
by Punctuator
Summary: The Outside of Your Skin Trilogy: Part Three. How the "Pod" people got to be the "Pod" people. Rated for cussing, gore, and half-baked psychedelia. Grab your shades, kids. It's time to SPLIT....
1. Chapter 1

**SPLIT**

He was terrified and ashamed, and he was trying to hide it. Whitby saw it in the set of Capa's mouth, in his twitching shoulders, in the extra layer of ice in his pale blue eyes. She was helping him unsuit while Corazon saw to Mace, who'd had no suit but a clumsy wrapping of insulation during his and Capa's and Harvey's leap from the _Icarus I_ to this, their _Icarus II,_ and who, fortunately, was too stupid to know he should be dead.

Harvey, the wiser man, had died moments ago or was still freezing to death— if he hadn't already floated past the outer edge of their forward shield and vaporized in the horrific glare of the sun. It didn't matter. He was beyond help. They all were. Whitby saw that in Capa's young face, too.

She eased him clear of his helmet and unfastened his gloves, listening to the quiet panting of his breath and hers. She realized that she should say something to him, something reassuring or comforting, but she knew that if she opened her mouth, anything that would come out would be along the lines of _You've well and truly fucked us, haven't you, little man?_

Corazon was dressing Mace's cracked and frozen hands while Mace shivered, hunched and silent, in a wrapping of blankets, and as Whitby broke the remaining seals on Capa's suit, purloined from the _Icarus I,_ she thought how part of the blame was hers. Mace had opposed their going to the _Icarus I,_ and she had backed him, but part of her had wanted, needed, _yearned_ to know what had happened to the project's first crew and their captain. So her protests to the second mission's commander, Kaneda, to its brilliant physicist, Capa, to its medic and psych officer, Searle, had been inadequate, perhaps moreso even than Mace's, which, as the protests of the _Icarus II_'s mechanic, had been snuffed by a quiet but round shouting-down from his betters on the team totem. She as pilot might have done more to prevent the rendezvous; up to crippling their ability to dock, she _should_ have done more.

But she hadn't. She'd behaved selfishly, thinking a thing being worse than doing it if it meant the nondoing of something essential. She'd wanted to _know_ (curiosity still being the most dangerous of unofficial sins), and now their own mission was at the point of collapse.

So it wasn't entirely Capa's fault, the deaths of Kaneda and comms officer Harvey, the abandonment of Searle, trapped aboard the _Icarus I_, the impending failure of their all-important task, to revive the dying sun. The boy could but follow the dictates of his logical cold brain. She'd been the one to fail her common sense.

Never mind. Too late now, wasn't it?

She looked to Mace, still shivering and staring hard at the deck in front of his frozen feet, and asked Corazon: "How is he?"

"He'll—" Corazon paused. She left the "survive" unspoken. A word they'd likely be removing from their collective vocabulary in the very, very near future. She said: "He's functioning."

"That'll do." Whitby pulled Capa from the remainder of his suit. He didn't try to shrug off the arm she kept around him. She felt his slender torso shaking against her side. "Let's get you fellows something hot to drink."

* * *

She made coffee while Corazon, the keeper of their atmosphere, ran the numbers on the oxygen remaining to them; she poured while Corazon told them when they were scheduled to die. She sat back in her chair at the table in the common area and cradled her cup to her chest, singeing her fingers but not minding, and thought what her brother Richie might say, just ahead of a pistol-muzzle-to-the-temple hand gesture: _At least the coffee's still decent. That's something, innit?_

The thing was, they might have air enough to do what they'd come to do: to chuck Capa's great Rubik's cube of dark matter and assorted radioactives into the sun and give Old Sol second thoughts about cashing out. The twist was, they hadn't air enough for all of them to make it to the chucking point.

"One of us needs to die," Corazon said, simply.

"Trey," Mace said, just as simply, in response. Their young navigator had triggered the mudslide of errors that had put them where they were now by botching the course correction that allowed them to rendezvous with the _Icarus I_; Whitby herself had come that close to killing him— "You changed our course without _me_? With _no fucking pilot on the flight deck_—?!"— before Kaneda and Mace pulled her off him; in short order, Trey had gone from mortification to deep depression, and Searle, good space doctor that he was, had consigned him to a purgatory of sedatives in Medical.

Now Whitby took a last sip of her good coffee and set her cup on the steel table. "We're not killing Trey," she said, slowly. "We're going to wake him up."

Mace looked at her coldly. "You heard Corazon: there's not enough air."

"If we stay here."

"And where the fuck are we supposed to go? We're dead, Whitby. We finish the mission; we die with— damn it, I don't know— We do our duty."

"We die with dignity," Corazon said, softly.

Capa nodded. "I agree."

Whitby glanced at him. "As if you have a say at this point."

"What the hell does that mean—?"

"No disrespect, Dr. Capa, but you've made your last bad judgment call on this trip."

Capa scowled at her, obviously deeply offended. "I made a decision based on the best available—"

"You tell that to Searle and Harvey. Tell it to Kaneda." She stared at him until Capa turned his scowl away, until he was what he'd always been in her eyes: a pale boy with an outsized brain and not an ounce of sense. "As a passenger, Dr. Capa, you've been tolerable. You're quiet, and you don't take up much room. As an advisor, you've proved lacking." She gave him a second; he wisely kept quiet, though his eyes on the space before him were hateful. Then she said to all of them: "We're going to configure for evacuation, and we're going to leave."

"Without delivering the payload?" Mace stared at her incredulously. "You coward. You God-damned—"

"Mace—" She fixed her eyes on him. "Shut up. We're delivering the payload. Capa primes it while we prep the lifepod. We can't provide atmosphere for the entire ship; we'll air what we can, that being the pod; we'll drop the bomb; we'll go—"

"From this distance in a pod? That far back? It's never been done."

"_None_ of this has ever been done, Mace."

"They tested those air recyclers using chimps."

"Should make you feel right at home."

"They _died_."

"They didn't know to clean the fucking filters, did they?"

"We're wasting oxygen," Corazon said. She rested her hand on Mace's shoulder; he half-turned to her; she said, gently: "You're losing air, and it's making you afraid. It's making all of us afraid. We should try this. We should at least try."

He left off glaring at Whitby. "Don't have anything better to do, do we?"

Corazon squeezed his shoulder. "No."

* * *

They went together to Medical, the four of them; there they'd divide the tasks to prepare for evacuation and then split up. Capa was behind the rest of them, saving his wind, avoiding Whitby's judging eyes. Then, like the barest of pressure on his back, he felt—

— _felt,_ because he certainly didn't _see_ anything, and his ears, it seemed, were filling with the growing wheeze in his breath—

— something. He stopped, turned, looked behind them. His heart tripped and fell in his chest.

Outside Comms, in a pocket of shadow, stood a human figure. Featureless at this distance, dark, tall—

"Searle—?" Capa gasped.

Its shadowy head turned his way. It looked at him with eyes Capa couldn't see. Then it stepped into Comms and disappeared.

"What is it?" Mace had stopped, too. He joined Capa, followed his gaze down the hall. "Did you see something?"

"I thought—" Capa frowned at the empty stretch behind them. "Mace, could Searle have made it back?"

"No." He waited a moment, then touched Capa's shoulder. When Capa looked at him, he said: "You have to focus, Capa. Air's messing with your head. You've got a job to do. Then we're going home, okay?"

At any other time, he might have felt a patronizing sting from Mace's tone. Now he couldn't even muster shame at the hope he felt in hearing the word: _home_.

"Okay."

* * *

Corazon was already in Medical, watching Whitby prep a hypoful of stimulants. Mace, coming in with Capa in tow, beat her to the question: "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"No." Whitby jetted the air from the syringe. "But if I'm wrong, at least Trey won't be wasting our precious oxygen, will he?"

* * *

He came up out of his drugged semi-coma with a panicked, ragged gasp. He looked at them unknowingly and then tipped his head into his hands and sat swaying on the cot's thin mattress.

"Trey." Corazon gently touched his arm. He flinched at the contact.

"Are you dead, too, Corrie?" he asked.

"We're not dead."

"But he said we were all—"

"_Who_-he?" Mace came closer, impatiently. "Trey, come on: wake up."

"I am awake. There was a—" Trey lowered his hands, looked at them, at the room. "Christ, I'm stoned, aren't I? I am fucking _stoned_."

"Putting it mildly," Capa muttered.

"Trey—" Whitby took him by the shoulders and said, when he met her eyes: "Our air is running out. We're evacuating. We need your help. But Mace wants you dead."

Mace sputtered: "Whitby, the _fuck_—?"

She looked at him coldly and nodded toward Trey, who was staring at Mace with a mix of shock and fear on his face. "It's got him focused, hasn't it?"

* * *

To seed and maintain a breathable atmosphere, the recycler aboard the pod would require air with a certain percentage of oxygen, a percentage that as of now was becoming increasingly difficult to find aboard the ship. Trey and Mace were to find such air, the sooner the better: the question was _where_?

"The suits," Mace said. "We'll empty the tanks on the suits. Then—" He looked at the others.

"The bomb housing," Capa said. "I won't be in there long. It's not as if the thing needs to breathe."

Whitby asked him: "When will you be ready to go?"

"You'll be transferring control from the ship's mainframe to the computers aboard the pod, right? I'll be ready when I have the new feed from the pod's computer."

"You'll have it within fifteen minutes. You'll be at the payload by then."

"Of course."

"We might have to separate earlier than we'd originally planned. The pod's engines won't have the thrust that the main engines do." She looked at him very directly. "If it came down to it, could you re-calculate the deployment?"

Capa hesitated. "Would you accept it if I said 'no'?"

"Not all of us would have to," Trey said.

"I would," Whitby countered.

"You might have to leave me behind." Capa's voice was even. "You have to admit that's an acceptable risk."

"I wouldn't leave you here alone," Whitby said. She looked from him to the others. "The pod's our chance. It's our choice, too." To Capa, she said: "You haven't answered me. Could you adjust if the deployment were sooner?"

"Forces are still behaving according to estimation at this distance. The destabilization begins after the drop point, not before."

"Can't you just say 'yes'?" Mace asked.

Capa smiled slightly. "No."

"Go on. Get going, then," Whitby said to him. "Mace, Trey: air and decoupling. Corazon--"

"Water, then food: yes." Their botanist-slant-nutritionist had volunteered to round up whatever no-refrigeration-required edibles she could find. "No bloody way I'm going to be stuck eating nothing but straight emergency rations for a year and a half."

* * *

Mace and Trey with their burden of tanks and tools shuffled as breathlessly as old men for the main suit locker. The designers of the second _Icarus_ had assumed that in an emergency the ship's computer systems might well be malfunctioning; when they planned for the module containing the flight deck to act as a lifepod, they'd arranged for most of its prep to be performed manually: locking hinges to be thrown by hand (and a good deal of force), grappling assemblies that would guide the pod's engines into place and hold them there, trans-bulkhead spigots and insulated piping through which would-be survivors would feed air and water to the tanks supplying the pod's environmental systems. Corazon and Whitby would channel water from the ship's main tanks to the pod, after which Corazon would be off scavenging and Whitby would be prepping the flight deck. _Good thing they don't have to carry that water in buckets,_ Mace thought. He was breathing through his mouth, so hard that his throat and the root of his tongue were starting to ache. As they reached the suit locker, he asked, hoarsely: "Are you with me, Trey?"

"Yeah." Trey unslung an oxygen tank as Mace unslung his. He looked more numbly breathless than fearful; he hovered for a moment as Mace started siphoning the air from the first suit. Then he said: "She was lying, wasn't she, Mace? Do you want to kill me?"

Mace could barely bring himself to meet Trey's eyes. He tried to tell himself it was the growing lack of oxygen, that the energy to lift his head would be energy wasted. "Yeah, Trey, she was lying."

"Because I— I'd do it myself, if you thought—"

"Jesus, Trey, don't be stupid. Give me a hand here, would you?"

* * *

She was on the flight deck even now, Whitby was, seated at the comms station while she finished initiating the lifepod's discrete data and power systems and closing off its ship-dependent ones. Easier to concentrate, sitting, less effort to breathe, less distraction from the increasingly rough beating of her heart.

She'd just indulged in a thought— _We might actually pull this off_— when something on a monitor above her head caught her eye.

A couple of months back, out of boredom, just to see if they could do it, she and Mace had rigged a thermal imaging tracking system for the public areas of the ship. Not for the showers or the sleeping quarters— "God forbid we should catch someone gettin' it on in this house of Brede," she'd said, drily— but both she and he had thought (and Kaneda agreed) it only made sense, from a safety standpoint, to know, generally, where people were on the ship.

She'd been half-watching the imaging now, while she waited for the mission's primary programs and files to load to the computers aboard the pod. Orange-red blips wandering squares of black and blue. One blip, well ahead of where she was on the flight deck: Capa. Two blips, to the side of and behind him: Trey and Mace, wrangling their oxygen-siphoning gear. Then, aft of the flight deck, in the Oxygen Garden—

— two blips, moving.

She thought it a trick of her peripheral vision, a twitch of her oxygen-starved brain. She looked up directly at the display. Though the fire in the Oxygen Garden had been extinguished, the area was still showing random pockets of heat. That's what she'd seen. Amazing, really, that the sensors still worked. She'd moved her head, looking at something else, and indirectly projected the motion to the display. Sure, now: only one blip moving, and that had to be Corazon. Likely she wanted a final look at her stricken paradise, and Whitby wouldn't be the one to call her on it. The blip that was Corazon stopped; she saw something useful in the wreckage, maybe—

And another blip moved on the screen.

Whitby rose from the comms seat, staring. "_Icarus_, patch me through to Corazon."

_Channel open, Whitby. _

The second blip reached the first, stopped.

"Corazon?" Whitby asked the air. "Corrie, are you there?"

Nothing. A low hiss of static from the feed. Nothing else.

Her heart pounded raggedly in her chest. "_Icarus_, who is in the Oxygen Garden with Corazon?"

_Unknown crewmember._

Shock. It took a moment to register. Then Whitby was running— already breathing hard in the oxygen-thin atmosphere— for the Oxygen Garden. "_Icarus_, get me Mace."

_Channel_ _op_—

"Mace?"

_Whitby? What is it?_

Not much distance between the flight deck and the ship's garden, and already, pushing through the shadows left when the fire took out the primary lighting between ops and Corazon's paradise, brownish smoke hanging in the air, she was winded. "I think we have an intruder."

_What? Say again—_

She was at the entrance to the Oxygen Garden. She looked in, panting and queasy from apprehension and the stale air. She stepped into the murky shadows, picked her way through the charred wreckage on the floor.

"Mace, I think we—" She stopped.

Corazon was just ahead of her, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She had something cupped in her hands: tiny, very green, frail. A plant. Bean shoot or some such. Her eyes were open, but she was very still, and something was more than wrong—

_Whitby, what is it?_

"Corrie?" She knew without touching her, knew even in this dim lighting the flat dullness in Corazon's eyes. She knew absolutely when she saw, stepping gingerly around and behind the other woman, the bloody hole in Corazon's spine.

"Christ. Oh, Christ—"

_Whitby, what the fuck—_

"She's dead, Mace." She touched Corazon's throat anyway, the pulse point just under her jaw, felt the nothing she knew she'd feel. "She's dead; she's been stabbed."

_I'm on my way— We're—_

"No." She shocked herself with the force in her voice. "Stay on task, Mace."

_No. We have to—_

"We have to get out of here. Stay on task. _Icarus_, all channels—"

_All chan—_

"Trey, Capa: we have an intruder. For God's sake, keep your eyes open."

* * *

Only after shocked acknowledgments from Trey and Capa, when the feed from her comm link went quiet, did she realize she hadn't exactly been minding her own surroundings. Fear hit her like a shove square between the shoulderblades. She looked around her, from her spot with Corazon in the dark and smoldering ruins, a full three-sixty—

"Whitby," she whispered to herself, "you stupid bloody bitch—"

But: nothing. Had the killer— whoever or whatever it was— and how much fear the mind could pack into that one tiny word, _it_— had the killer still been in the Oxygen Garden, she'd be as dead as their mission's botanist.

She took a last look at Corazon. _Stay on task_. Then she left the Oxygen Garden and made for the flight deck, their soon-to-be lifepod. She hoped, grimly, that she'd find it empty.

* * *

It was.

She swept the flight deck with her eyes. She walked it quickly, then, too, the upper deck and the lower, looked shamelessly behind every chair, under every console. She even looked up at the bloody ceiling. She'd never been fond of horror films: too often the fools in them trusted their screenwriters and directors to show them where the monster might be lurking, and those fools ended up lied to, misled, and dead. So she checked thoroughly, herself, and then she settled herself at the pilot's station with an eye on the hatch leading out and continued the prep for evacuation.

And now, hyper-vigilant as she was, she noticed almost instantly that the ship's engines were overheating.

Monitor bank to her left. Temperature lines spiking across the drive system. Spiking and rising. Three words in old-school glowing lime:

COOLANT SYSTEM FAILURE

She toggled the switches for the coolant system: no response.

The fault was at the source. Physical, actual. Not in the circuitry.

* * *

Again Whitby was up; again, she proceeded aft. And in the engine room of the _Icarus II,_ she found—

(She stopped dead, staring—) A human. Tall, male. Wearing— though the shadows seemed to be shifting around him: something in the air was making him indistinct, as though the light were reluctant to touch him— tattered remnants of clothing, trousers, filthy bits of a t-shirt that stuck to the ruin of his skin, burned and cracked, all of him a horror in rough black and sticky red—

"Must be very soon now," he said quietly, turning to her. His voice was accented and deep. "You're here."

She took a step closer, to better see him. She could barely breathe for fear, for the jolting beat of her heart. "Who the hell are you?"

"Don't be afraid, Loinnir."

Her breath caught in her throat, stuck there, stumbled out as a choke: "Dan?"

Pinbacker. Daniel. Captain of the _Icarus I._

Now _he_ came a step closer, and she could see his eyes. Dark and intent as she'd remembered, but shining, as though they carried their own light. Alive in the dead burned horror of his face. And quite, quite insane.

He spoke softly, watching her: "He promised me so many things-- When I died, I'd see you again."

"Who?"

"God. You talk to Him, too; I know you do."

She was having trouble thinking; she was having trouble drawing air; her voice made hardly any sound: "Dan, what have you done--?"

"Not long now. We'll all go to Him together."

"You killed Corazon. You killed--" Kaneda burning alive, Harvey dying in space, Searle abandoned on the _Icarus I_. She edged toward the engine room's primary controls, feeling dizzy and sick. "You want to kill all of us. Everyone on Earth-- You're trying to stop the mission."

"There is no mission. Not anymore."

Whitby was at the primary control panel, but the controls were nothing but a smashed mess of metal and plastic. Then Pinbacker was there, too, and there was something in his hand. Something glinting and sharp. Whitby caught the flash in the corner of her eye; she spun sideways, and the scalpel— she saw, with shocked and frozen precision, that's what it was— sliced the air to the right of her neck. Pinbacker's hand and the scalpel in their unimpeded trajectory hit one of the monitors near the control panel; the screen cracked and went black. He slashed at Whitby again, grabbing for her; she ducked, tripped, fell hard on her knees. She was gasping, trying to get her feet under her, when he gripped the back of her t-shirt and heaved her up.

Blindly, instinctively: as he pulled her backward, just as her torso snapped straight, Whitby grabbed at her right boot. The scalpel in Pinbacker's hand flashed toward her throat-- and she stabbed something, hard, into the inner side of his right thigh. She twisted it, twisted herself in his grip, wheezing, terrified--

Pinbacker shouted in pain. He lost his grip on Whitby. She tumbled free, pulling loose as she fell whatever it was she had jabbed into Pinbacker's leg. Blood sprayed.

He grabbed her by the hair, then by the head. He had dropped the scalpel. By now, breaking her neck would do just as well. She twisted her torso to follow the motion of his twisting hands-- it was all she could do. She got her free hand under his arm, along his side, braced herself against him, and shoved the thing with which she stabbed his leg hard into the left side of his throat, just under his chin. Then she yanked it free and got a faceful of arterial blood.

He didn't try to grab for the diving knife. That's what it was. The thinking— between Whitby and her brother Richie, between Whitby and her diving pals and the ocean back home— had always been that you never took your best knife on a dive unless you well and truly wanted to lose that knife. So she had as part of her dive gear a half-dozen or so knives of solid but not flawless steel or alloy and cheap plastic handles. Then, on the day before the _Icarus II_ was to depart from the launch station in orbit, the shuttle from Earth had delivered, along with the mission's most last-minute supplies, a package for her: a beautiful dual-edged matte-black CRKT ankle knife, a single flawless piece of steel in its black plastic-and-mesh sheath, bearing the inscription "For Sunday best.— Richie." And, being well away from the dastardly knife-swallowing Atlantic, she'd managed in these sixteen sun-bound months not to lose it. She still had a grip on it— but now the handle was slippery with blood. Pinbacker— even he'd been in on the joke, years back, eight of them or better: he'd asked her once, half smiling, wholly concerned, how she expected to do battle with the terrors of the deep armed only with the kind of knife you could buy by the bucketful at a hardware store— now Pinbacker— then Daniel, then Dan, then hers, now a nightmare— took her by the jaw and the back of the head--

-- and their eyes met. Maybe he hesitated. Maybe he didn't. Maybe the extra second had always been hers--

In that second, Whitby slammed the blade of the knife into his left temple. A cracking sound. Like bone puncturing. Or time splitting. Pinbacker froze. He focused on her, hard, blinked as though confused--

And toppled to the deck, taking her with him.


	2. Chapter 2

She lay for a long moment with Pinbacker, more dead than stunned.

Then she got up.

* * *

For a time she'd thought they might be able to pilot the _Icarus_ from the pod. Now that possibility was gone. She pulled her bloody self upright at the ruined control panel, saw nothing in the engine displays. All the monitors— not just the one Pinbacker had punched through— were black. She said: "_Icarus_, compute time to engine failure."

_Please clarify, Whitby._

She was shaking so hard she could barely stand. _Play stupid, would you, you worthless bitch_. "_Icarus_, when will the engines explode?"

_If temperature increase remains steady, ship's main engines will explode in eighteen minutes, twenty-six seconds._

* * *

His concession to the homicidal presence onboard: he was facing the hatch as he worked. Capa was kneeling on the catwalk in the geometric darkness of the bomb housing, feeding new numbers to his field unit, patched, as it was, into the computer systems aboard the pod, when Whitby's voice spoke from his comm link:

_Robert?_

She never called him that except to put him in his place age-wise: her way of making him a sort of baby brother, he thought, of patronizing him. But her voice now sounded odd— tired or afraid—

"Yes, Whitby?"

_Can you be ready to go in fourteen minutes?_

She didn't want explanations. He could hear that. He thought of the lines of code he'd just entered, that quickly, to reschedule the deployment of the payload. He thought for the barest of seconds of telling her "No." Then he re-registered the tone of her voice— _she'd not be asking if it weren't absolutely, coldly, desperately essential_— and he said: "Yes, I can."

_Do it, then. Whitby out—_

The channel went dead. He'd learned to tell. He said: "_Icarus_?"

Nothing. He didn't bother calling for Whitby or the others. He started the lap timer on his watch— t minus fourteen minutes— and went back to work.

* * *

He hadn't heard the scream.

* * *

Whitby had. Right before the comms cut out, right after the ship's primary lighting flickered, flared, and died. Before the emergency lighting could kick in, she was out of the engine room and making her way forward.

In the long months they'd been aboard the _Icarus II_, even before she'd begun to re-read her literature files, even before she'd tired of her vid library and workouts, she'd taught herself to walk the _Icarus_ blind. She'd measured and memorized all the ship's distances in carefully counted paces: the skill of a wreck diver, who must know every twisting exit in the zero visibility of silty water. As a result, she could find her way to or from any point onboard in pitch blackness.

So now, as minute fourteen eroded to minute thirteen, in complete darkness, she was heading for Comms or the mainframe room, toward the origin of the first scream and the screams and shouts now following. She was moving quickly and calmly, blackness being the same the solar system over. She might have been in cold deep water back home.

And, moving, she no longer had to think of the horror lying on the engine room floor. A new horror lay ahead.

* * *

Roughly two minutes earlier, Mace had looked through the reinforced glass into the aquarium of coolant housing the ship's mainframes and thought— later it would seem stupid— _Which is why you never slap a band-aid on the computer_.

He and Trey had just finished loading their last tankful of oxygen to the systems that would supply the pod's recyclers; Mace had just pulled himself from the hatch accessing the trans-bulkhead interface between the _Icarus_ and the pod. Trey offered him a hand up, and he took it gratefully, breathless in the increasingly airless air. They'd exit via the mainframe room, it being nearer to the flight deck than Comms, which they'd traversed bringing the air from the ship's forward areas to the pod interface; Trey went first, and as he passed the coolant tank, nearly two meters tall as it was, he'd bumped up against something—

"What's this?" He stopped; Mace stopped, too. In that second, as they both saw in the dim light of the mainframe room the wires strung like a web in the air before them, Mace heard a splash from the coolant tank.

He looked, his eyes following too the path of the wires; he saw where they ran— to a gray plastic box roughly one foot square, open at its top at the edge of the coolant tank and now tipped, at the wires' tug, on its side; he saw, sinking into the clear blue of the coolant, maybe a dozen thick squares of Handipatch.

"Shit," he breathed.

_Why you never slap a band-aid on the computer._

Or, perhaps less cryptically, what came of having too many unassociated contractors providing parts and systems for your multi-billion-dollar spaceship. Obviously, the 5M Corporation had never intended for Handipatch to be anything other than a highly useful and effective quick-fix, just as Macrosoft Universal had formulated Supercool to keep the ship's computer systems insulated and functioning at peak efficiency.

Together, Handipatch and Supercool made a bomb. As simple as that. The catalyst in the 'patch acted as an accelerant in the liquid; the liquid superheated in seconds; the mixture exploded. Mace had seen vids of the process in experiments matching maybe an inch of 'patch with a cup of 'cool. Experiments requiring the use of robot arms and heavy cladding. A potential disaster easy enough to avoid, nonetheless: you simply never put Handipatch anywhere near Supercool. And, to remind yourself, you kept in your head a joking mantra: _Why you never slap a band-aid on the computer._

"Move—!" he shouted. He shoved Trey toward the hatchway leading out. Already the coolant was bubbling— it was as though it were catching fire, and Mace could hear that fire hissing, drawing air to itself— and going from ice-blue to a boiling red—

— and Trey, twisting his head to look at the tank, spun into the web of wires, stumbled sideways, and got caught—

— as the tank shattered.

Mace had grabbed him even as Trey stumbled; he dove for the exit with Trey's left wrist gripped hard in his hand; and as he and Trey cleared the hatch just ahead of a hurricane of glass and lava-like liquid and sharp chunks of mainframe, the fire shutter shot across the hatch frame, the bloody thing cued to any sudden changes in temperature around the mainframe and moving almost as fast as thought, and trapped Trey's right arm just below the shoulder.

Inside the mainframe room, flaming coolant splattered Trey's trapped arm. His shirt ignited, and Trey screamed.

* * *

Whitby was there thirty seconds later; seconds after that she had the pry bar from the emergency cabinet off Comms, and she was bracing Trey away from the hatch as best as she was able, while Trey shouted in agony and panic inches from her face and Mace wedged the bar between the fire shutter and the hatch frame and pushed and the three of them stood in a blistering haze of heat. The shutter surrendered maybe two inches of space, and Whitby pulled Trey free. Mace dropped the bar; the shutter snapped shut. Whitby had Trey on the deck, beating the flames off his arm and shoulder; Mace pulled off his shirt and dropped to his knees and wrapped the shirt around Trey's arm and held on while Trey flailed and howled and the flames snuffed out.

The emergency lighting had come on. Mace hadn't even noticed. He knelt by Trey, now shuddering and hitching and whimpering in pain on the deck, his right arm and shoulder smoking and horrifically charred, and glanced across at Whitby: "Let's get him to—"

He stopped.

She was covered in blood.

* * *

"We have roughly eleven minutes to get clear," Whitby said. "The engines are going to explode."

Mace didn't bother asking how she knew this. He and she had dragged Trey to the pod, and now they were trying to get a shot of painkiller into him while horrible thoughts flashed through Mace's mind: _She's covered in blood. She was alone with Corazon and the engines and the mainframe and now—_

_Just fucking ask._

He jabbed the autoshot against Trey's left forearm, and while Trey's thrashing became weaker and slower he looked Whitby in the eye. "Did you sabotage the mission?"

"_Fuck_, Mace— Christ. Jesus Christ, no." She stared at him, stricken. She started to shake: he saw it move from her sternum out. She looked away, her eyes filling with tears—

"Loinnir—"

He reached for her. She avoided his hand, straightening herself away from him and Trey. She scowled and pulled her right palm savagely across her bloody cheek and said: "I'll fetch Robert. You mind Trey and yourself. Pod's leaving in nine minutes."

* * *

A concession, a diver's skills or no: before she left the pod, she took a flashlight from the equipment box near what would be their outer hatch. She looked forward, out toward Comms, through blackness, flickering blue emergency lighting, flashes of fire, and brown acrid smoke, and thought she might as well be on a wreck in hell with her air too far gone. She said nothing else to Mace, no _take care_ or _see you soon_, no stupid declaration. She just started out, toward the far end of the ship, toward the launch platform, the bomb, and Capa.

* * *

Capa had continued to prep for deployment of the payload. He'd continued, calmly. He'd thought without his mind at all straying from its equations, code, and numbers that his body must be adjusting to the thinner air. It was becoming easier to breathe. He felt his fingers move on the keyboard of the mobile unit while he watched the display, felt his mind transmitting data to those fingers effortlessly, felt calm. As though he were watching himself work. Beyond the hatch of the bomb housing, the main lighting aboard the _Icarus_ flickered and died. He hardly noticed: he had his own lamp beside him on the catwalk, and, really, light was unnecessary at this point anyway. His brain and hands knew the launch procedure; they didn't need to see.

He felt calm. He felt— began to feel—

Again, behind him, the main lighting aboard the _Icarus_ flickered and died. He noticed it more this time, a product of repetition: he looked toward the hatch, and he felt—

— as though he were watching himself work. He focused on the hatch. His head was full of data, and his fingers moved on the keyboard of the mobile unit. He began to feel—

— not an increase in gravity, not exactly. More as if—

— he set coordinates—

— he were falling into himself. He saw— and he felt his eyes widen in a skull— widen in _his_ skull—

— the sequence begin. Stars rained from above him, and—

— he was inside the bomb housing, this much closer to the sun. He looked ahead, down the catwalk, and he saw—

— himself, setting coordinates, as he himself—

— felt himself falling into himself as he entered the final coordinates as he started the countdown as he saw the numbers on the display running down x minutes to ignition and deployment x minutes to detonation as he—

— saw, no widening of eyes but in wonder, stars high above, one and two and three of them, slowly raining from the distant dark ceiling as he—

— watched himself watching himself stand and turn—

— _re-turn_—

— turn to the hatch back to the _Icarus_, but it had to be all of him or none, and one of him thought—

— _stay_. As he saw himself as he'd been twenty minutes ago or fifteen or ten, coming through the hatch, coming closer, as he saw himself setting up the mobile unit, saw himself setting—

— coordinates in a raining of stars. Whitby came through the hatch, the passage behind her dark, one of her only, and her shirt and arms and face were red with—

— "Robert, are we good to go?" she asked, and he asked her in return: "Can't you see it?"—

— the stars in a downpour now, and it was so beautiful he couldn't breathe for the beauty of it—

— only he wasn't the one she was asking. She asked him as the stars begin to rain down in ones and twos and threes: "Robert, are we good to go?"— and he could—

— smell the blood on her as he saw himself those feet away—

— in a downpour of stars, smiling—

— and he said to the woman in blood—

— she had him by the arm, her grip hard enough to hurt him—

— to anchor him, this one _him_—

— who said, "Yes," and came away with her as she pulled him hard down the catwalk, through the hatch—

— this much closer to the sun. She didn't go back for the others— it was as though she didn't see them— _him_— and the last thing he saw behind himself, this one self, through the gangway separating the bomb housing from the ship, before the hatch closed and sealed and the red-covered woman dragged him into a panting desperate run, was—

— Robert Capa, standing in a downpour of stars.

* * *

Mace met them in the final meters, as Whitby and Capa emerged from the darkness and smoke. While the temperature in the pod was stable, implying that the flight deck had been successfully sealed unto itself, the passage to Comms was starting to heat up; likely the fire from the mainframe had managed to move inside the ship's bulkheads. An understatement, certainly: they had to leave.

He ran out into the corridor and caught Capa's free arm while Whitby dragged Capa by the other. At a glance, Capa was unhurt, but he seemed blank-eyed and stunned.

"What happened to him?" Mace asked.

"I don't know," Whitby panted hoarsely. "Countdown's running. Close the hatch." She released Capa, who slumped to the deck when Mace released him, too, and stumbled for the pilot's seat as Mace hauled at the heavy emergency door that would now be their outer airlock hatch; he had it halfway closed when he heard something—

— a hiss or a whisper, something like a woman's voice— he'd been short of oxygen and overloaded on adrenaline for far too long— something like his name:

_Mace_.

He leaned out through the gap remaining before the hatch swung shut, and he saw a figure standing in the smoke and shadow outside Comms.

"Corrie—?" he said.

And the hiss became a crackling that was no longer anything like his name, and an electrical panel near the left side of his head burst from the bulkhead with a roaring bark and a flash of flame as bright as molten steel, as bright as Searle's sun filtered through the window in the observation lounge—

— _only four-percent intensity, and the retinas smolder_—

— and Mace's head and shirtless shoulders were right in the path of this bright new fire. He grabbed at his searing face, shouting and then screaming.

Whitby was up, horrified, from the controls. Mace, stumbling backward, fell into her; she shoved him aside, pulled the outer hatch closed. Flames pinched off like cut tentacles and turned to tendrils of smoke in the pod's air.

"Mace—" She reached for him; he was flailing; he knocked her hands away. His face was transformed. Gore and blisters, his hair smoldering, his eyebrows gone—

"Mace—!" Whitby shouted.

He froze. He stood for a moment, shaking as though with sobs. Then he slumped back against the bulkhead. "I can't see," he said, thickly.

She tried not to look at his glazed eyes, his burned lids. "Sit down. We need to go."

"Okay."

* * *

They left.

* * *

Four minutes later, they were at a distance the designers of the _Icarus II_ would have designated "safe." They weren't. Whitby heard the heat whispering and hissing between the multiple layers of the pod's form-tight bulkhead shields— "micro-heat-sink redundant" or some other brand of bullshit they were, experimental tech too risky and too expensive for the ship as a whole but in the eyes of the lifepod's designers perfectly suited to a life-or-death field test of sheer desperation— and she fought the urge to scream or vomit. Trey was groaning from his haze of meds. Mace was sitting against the bulkhead near the inner hatch, crying harshly.

Capa was silent. He was breathing slowly, lying where he'd fallen, and his eyes were open.

* * *

Maybe six minutes after that, two things happened, the first overshadowed— or overshone— by the second:

Whitby had underestimated the time remaining to them aboard ship: only now did the _Icarus II_ self-destruct when her primary engines exploded.

And fresh clean light washed from the screen showing the view of the sun. Whitby looked at it, then looked away. They'd succeeded. Or Capa had. Whitby only felt numb. She checked their flight trajectory and went to help Mace.

* * *

She brought a medical kit and knelt beside him. Mace was sitting against the bulkhead, his legs straight out, shaking. His unseeing eyes were dull and unfocused; his face was a horror.

"Mace, can you hear me?"

"Yeah."

"I'm going to fix you up, okay?"

"Okay." The word slurred; he was halfway to shock. "Did it work?"

"Yeah."

"That's good." He smiled, shuddered as the exposed nerves in his face pulled tight. "Cass—"

Cassidy. The mission's pilot before Whitby replaced her. Thoughtful, competent, loyal, sweet Cassidy, who'd chosen to stay on the dying Earth for reasons that Whitby would sooner die to keep concealed rather than see those reasons hurt Mace now. She tapped the air from an autoshot of painkiller. "She's not here, Mace."

He flinched as the needle broke his skin, likely more from the coolness of the metal than from the tiny point of pain. As she began, gently, to tend to his face, as his breathing slowed and grew heavy from the meds, he asked: "Who are you?"

She hesitated. Maybe part of her had died on the _Icarus_. Maybe she was ashamed of her survival, new and painful and raw as it was.

"I'm the pilot," she said.

**THE END**


End file.
